I’m still day dreaming aboutPrague mornings. Everything should start with pastel streets and sculptures (even if the ones on the Charles Bridge are actually just really old replicas) and wool coats. We don’t have an excess of pretty winter wear in SC, and I’d rather not make any other compasrisons between Prague and the faux-rural mostly suburban city I live in.
Let’s just say I was happy. « Read the rest of this entry »

When I asked my friend Kendall what her favorite thing about living in Prague was, she paused, then replied, “just the café culture. Being able to sit and write and read.” I nodded because that’s the best part about living in general.

Good morning from Praha! I’ve spent a week walking and walking and walking. + Admiring these streets, these cafes, some aggressive river side swans, and excellent unexpected company. Sundays are for coffee and lazing and sometimes czech poetry. Prague is the Golden City fo sho.

Oh! Here’s a piece I wrote part fashion, part travel, mostly sentimental for a site I’m pretty excited about, Millennials Or Die. Read if you’d like and check out their mission and other stellar posts thus far!

I’ll say this: there are special places and they’re obvious. They’re storybook. They’re historical. And you’re lucky, really, to enter it. To eat it. I kept a food log during my time in Grandcamp-Maisy, in northwestern France. Those entries speak louder, more clearly, more articulate of how it was waking up and sleeping and just being there than the photographs do. Regardless, I took these. I look at them. Voilà.

I wake up and it’s pink. The sun rises in Normandy in jewel tones. No lie. Or at least it does on the mornings I stop and notice it. Like a cartoon character, I wear one outfit: white crewneck t-shirt, black v-neck sweater, boyfriend jeans, a beige cable knit wool sweater of unknown origin (from a thrift store in The Isle of Mull), work boots, a watch. I read a poem from a particle blue book. I eat breakfast which is a third of a baguette with butter and a homemade jam (rhubarb, raspberry, peach, red-plum, blackberry, snozberry) , black coffee, and one glass of raw, unpasteurized milk. I chat with the sixty-four year old woman who lets me live in her house and work for her. After breakfast, I open the door to the chicken (and two ducks) coop, where they fly out without flying. They’re loud. Then I do the same thing, but on a separate part of the property. I walk past the Billy goat named Bebe, through a series of wooden gates, past the vegetable garden, past four apple trees, past a green lawn surrounded by trimmed hedges (like every fairy tale I ever wanted), and I let two geese out of their home. They are also loud. There is a donkey in a field and donkey’s are gorgeous which is a thing I didn’t know. On Monday, it pressed its giant donkey head against a crumbling stonewall and stayed there for a long, long time. Which was both depressing and adorable. I pick the apples that have fallen overnight. I walk to the stable and climb a pile of logs and throw them down near a wheelbarrow. I do this one at a time because my arms are pretty weak and also because this motion, the selecting and throwing the logs, is beyond therapeutic. I wheelbarrow the wood to the house and I feed them to a cobalt-blue enamel wood-burning stove. If you think it’s impossible for a human to love a stove, you’re mistaken. It’s a really pretty stove. And then I do whatever needs to be done, which varies. There is no such thing as clean fingernails in my narrative now. And the day goes on and eventually I’m in the parlor reading or I’m running on the shore of a famous part of the coast or I’m listening to someone incredibly generous talk to me about her children, fabric, fisherman or I’m making tea or I’m staring at the stove. And it’s very, very nice.

Unsure if anyone in Edinburgh actually lives there. The city is built on the grounds of natural disaster. It’s gorgeous. You can’t really blame it for being full of tourists. The architecture, the lights, that park, a castle, the leaves in November. These are all good, justifiable things drawing everybody in. Too many people wearing cameras (including me, let’s be real) but too many pretty things to look at. Balance, maybe. And many, many uphill steps.